Reviewed - Romanzo Criminale/Crime Story: SET against turbulent political events in Italy between 1977 and 1992, Michele Placido's vigorous gangster movie inevitably evokes Marco Tullio Giordana's magisterial epic The Best of Youth.
While Romanzo Criminale doesn't aspire to the sheer scale and ambition of that masterpiece, it makes for arresting cinema that never flags. Placido exhibits a firm command of narrative, rhythm and visual style, and he elicits vivid performances from his capable cast.
A prologue introduces the three protagonists as teenagers, when they steal a car and knock down a policeman while recklessly driving through a roadblock. They emerge from prison as young adults, harder, more experienced and intent on a life of crime.
Ice (Kim Rossi Stuart), who is as cool as his nickname and the only one to show any semblance of a conscience, is drawn into a different world when he falls for his brother's tutor (Jasmine Trinca). Dandy (Claudio Santamaria) becomes involved with a statuesque prostitute (Anna Mougalis), and buys her a 14-room house to run as a brothel. Lebanese (Pierfranco Favino), volatile and unscrupulous,, fancies himself as as an emperor and aims at setting up his own unholy Roman empire.
Beginning with an audacious kidnapping that yields a high ransom, the gang eliminate their criminal opposition in succinct montages that recall similar sequences in The Godfather, and an informer is cold-bloodedly killed in broad daylight on the Spanish Steps. They proceed to drug dealing, holding back supplies to push up the price, and money laundering in Switzerland, while a determined detective struggles with corruption in his own ranks as he tries to bring them to justice.
Bridging sequences efficiently encapsulate the period background, incorporating newsreel footage of key events: the abduction and murder of Aldo Moro, the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, the Bologna railway station bombing, Italy's 1982 World Cup victory, the fall of the Berlin Wall. The soundtrack effectively employs pop music of the era - Queen, Sweet, The Pretenders, and an Italian-language cover of You Were On My Mind - along with excerpts from the opera Nessun Dorma.
